I think I’m gonna ask about something that has been on my mind and I know must be floating through the minds of others.
Call me a fatalist. Call me depressed. I just don’t know that it will be possible to end terrorism. Terrorism, in some form, has existed since the dawn of time. Ancient tribes held sneaky raids on opposing villages, dismembering the corpses to spread fear and terror. Crusaders burned towns. Anarchists lobbed bombs into crowds. Luddites sabotaged machinery. Mobs lynched.
Modern terrorism is, well, terrible, but it is the logical extension of technology to an age-old tradtion of useing fear and civilian violence cow populations into submission and to advance an unpopular or disenfranchised cause.
Do we really think it is possible to eliminate this? It seems like this is a fundamental human evil, not the sort of thing that can be cleaned up with a strategic operation. So we get rid of governments that support terrorist. Fine- terrorists can work without governments. So we infilterate terrorist cells- new ones will form. Even if we destroyed Islamic fundamentalism completly, some new extremist group would pop up. They most we can do is get rid of this particular threat.
It isn’t like a tradtional war where new governments will get set up and we can base our hopes for peace with those new governments. Terrorism operates outside of the bounds of borders, far from the world of mainstream beliefs and away from the hope of diplomacy. It isn’t tied to one particular situation- one particular group of people.
Elininating terrorism seems like eliminating murder, or molestation or battery. Bush said he wants to “rid the world of evil”, and it seems like it would take a messiah, not just the leader of the free world (so to speak) to do all that. Is it really possible to get rid of terrorism or are we chasing a pipe dream that is even more unlikely than peace among the nations?
No, we can’t end terrorism. People will always want to use violence in an attempt to force their way at things. However, what we can do is try to discourage its practice as much as possible, and try to neutralize (which means either capture or kill) known terrorists.
And as for Bush’s talk… well… there’s a difference between hyperbole and actual policy.
I don’t think anyone realistically thinks that you can end all forms of terrorism. However we can do our best to make sure to eliminate those we find and discourage fanatical terrorist groups from existing. In the long term this requires a lot more then simple military intervention.
I used to live in Texas and I’m more then a little familiar with their state government. I can’t recall anyone in Texas being called the Executor General nor can I think of any office that would fit the description. I guess this was just some lame attempt at criticism because of the death penalty in Texas. Let me point something out to you though. The governor of Texas cannot sentence anyone to die. The governor of Texas does not generally issue a stay of execution unless the Texas Board of Pardons acts. And finally the governor of Texas does not personally execute anyone. Would you refer to Ann Richards a former Executioner General?
I agree, however human behavior can in fact be altered by force of arms.
You don’t like the President, fine. I’m not his biggest fan either. You don’t like the death penalty, fine. I have to admit I have serious reservations about it myself. You want to voice objections to US foreign policy, fine. I think it is fantastic that we live in a country where dissenting opinions can be heard.
But when you refer to him as the Executor General of Texas you sound just like those idiots who refer to Clinton as Klinton, Al Gore as algore, and believe in some big consipracy covering the murder of Vince Foster.
But it does not seem out of line to refer – however sarcastically – to the principles of the man who has promised us the “elimination of Evil” by the use of deadly force.
call me a media-obsessed american, but it seems to me the real war against terrorism is a p.r. war.
i don’t know about you, but i see the extremist pakistanis (btw how extreme are they by pakistani standards?) rallying in huge numbers and burning gwb effigies and i think:
god what a bunch of jerks
we must have really sh*tty p.r. there.
hey, don’t the paks have nukes?
We can bomb afghanistan into dust and assassinate the whole of al qaeda 3 times over, but i’m not sure it would be such a great victory if that earned us twice the number of rioting pakistanis. Or egyptians, or saudis or french or whatever.
P.R. is an art. We’re good at it, and we gotta use it. That means no “CRUSADES” against terrorism. No footage of bleeding innocent babies from our bombing. No stories of dead muslim-americans who got shot up by rednecks. More muslims giving opening prayers in congress. etc. I’m sure you can think of more.
It’s fine to go after the terrorists per se. But never mention them in the same breath as “muslims” or “arabs” or even “fundamentalists.” And like I said - no dead babies.
I think you’re probably right about the importance of P.R., uglybeech, but unfortunately another obstacle to the end of all terrorism is the lack of education in many countries which breed it. For example, those Pakistanis that you may have seen burning effigies of George W. Bush - and I saw them burning effigies of his father in the Gulf War days - are uneducated people who in many cases cannot even sign their own names. These people are unfortunately vulnerable to whichever person comes along and, in order to further his own political agenda, decides to incite them against the U.S., the West, Israel, India, whatever. They do not represent the views of the educated Pakistanis, who ridicule fundamentalists, study and work in the U.S. and are anti-terrorism. But unfortunately the literacy rate in Pakistan is something like 7% (although I think official figures put it at much higher) so that leaves a large number of people who do not really think for themselves. When you can’t read, don’t have a television or a computer, and can’t afford to travel, well, you don’t really have any way to entertain yourself other than rioting in the street for some reason or the other. I really believe that if somehow the people in countries like Pakistan were better-educated, that would help decrease the incidence of terrorism and war. Of course many terrorists are intelligent and educated and still feel the way they do, but public opinion would not support them as it does to some extent now.
Well, I was just trying to answer your question about Pakistani extremists… don’t know if I did…
I, too, feel that we cannot eliminate terrorism, but I wouldn’t consider myself a fatalist because of it. I simply feel that humans are not infinirely malleable and that crazy people exist and this is a recipe for strange folks sitting on the curbside, serial killers, terrorists, and other folk (hate to lump everyone together like that, but the implication is that terrorists are unbalanced in some way, something I hope is pretty obvious).
We can eliminate “breeding” grounds, though, through a more invasive humanitarian aid program (as funny as that sounds), destroying existing terrorist training camps, and making it vrey uncomfortable for any government to aid or even shelter known terrorists.
To do so will require diplomacy the likes of which the US has never seen, and a show of force much more precise than the Gulf War strikes.
beech, Pakistan is indeed a nuclear power. They tested their nukes (sorta gives it away) a few years ago.
This is the question of the hour. I don’t think that the complete elimination of terrorism is possible, any more than the complete elimination of crime is possible.
I heard an interesting take on this by a terrorism expert whose name I can’t recall: that terrorism becomes a way of life for some, and that they can’t stop even if their demands were met. They get to a point where they really don’t know how to do anything else; they become, in a sense, “professional terrorists.”
We have to do something, but the complete elimination of terrorism is an unrealistic goal, just as the complete elimination of crime would be an unrealistic goal. There are costs involved in a “war on crime.” As an analogy, Giuliani & Co. greatly reduced crime in NYC, but at a cost: a climate of arrogance by some police, which arguably led to the infamous Amadou Diallo shooting. In other words, nothing’s perfect.
I agree with you, King Rat, that some people appear to be bent on terrorism to the extent that they seem not even to care about their demands any more. But I think if one could perhaps reduce public support for them, they would maybe find it harder to pull large-scale attacks like this off - people around them would be more likely to turn them in or to inform the authorities, they wouldn’t find so many willing followers or people willing to hide them, etc.